Türk Telekom--a leading
communication and convergence technology company in Turkey and the country’s
most valuable brand for the last four years according to Brand Finance--provides fixed line communications and broadband internet services. The
company, which was founded in 1994 by separating from Posta ve Telgraf
Teşkilatı, the national post and telegraph directorate of Turkey, owns more
than 14.3 million fixed access lines—nearly all fixed access lines in
Turkey—and 7 million asymmetric, digital subscriber lines.

Challenges and Goals

Türk Telekom’s challenge came with
growth in becoming a leader in their industry.Customer relationship, sales, marketing, and finance departments needed
accurate, timely, and well reported data from the organization's core CRM,
billing and payment systems.Unfortunately, the overall data latency, movement, and accuracy were not
optimal.The reports needed by these
departments were critical for business practices around debt tracking and
collecting, detecting of revenue leakages, overall churn prevention, as well as
revenue assurance controls.In addition,
these reports needed to incorporate online real-time data as well as historical
data.In response to the challenges it
faced, Türk Telekom set out to build a solution where reports would be
delivered on time with maximum performance, leveraging all the appropriate data
for better data analysis relevant to the critical business processes.Initially, the team tried to serve all the
reports from core OLTP systems, quickly realizing they suffered from
performance issues.They needed to
reduce the amount of data on the OLTP system, and have the ability to report
leveraging the historical data, all at the same time.Additionally, unplanned downtime with the
systems was becoming an issue, and the need for data archiving became apparent.

Solution and Results

Türk Telekom was familiar with
GoldenGate, as they had used it for their real-time data warehouse, as well as
for some zero downtime migrations.Pleased with their prior results, they embarked on a new project in
using Oracle GoldenGate for online archiving.This may very well be the first implementation of its kind in the
market.Oracle GoldenGate is used to
replicate the data to the archive database with near real-time latency, with
the ability to purge historical data from the core OLTP database without
replicating the purge activity to the archive database.Unlike other archiving solutions, the archive
database contains not only historical data but also hot data, and, the archiving
processes run while the systems are online and in real-time – not with offline
scheduled batches.

Development and testing took about six months, and once this solution was
implemented, it showed big results, very quickly.Within 1 month’s time of the solution’s
go-live, full return on investment was achieved.Türk Telekom has saved approximately 55
million US dollars in revenue during just the first year !The company has decreased overall churn rate
due to debt by 60%, and has drastically increased OLTP performance by 10X.The business now has immediate access to
sales, marketing and financial reports – providing the appropriate departments
data to better handle debt tracking, and revenue leakages for example.As initially promised, the reports generated
combine historical and real-time data as desired for the business.

Türk Telekom also saw many technical
improvements based on this solution as well.65% percent of disk space was saved once the historical data was
archived.Storage and back-up costs
shrunk by 40%, and maintenance costs of the production database decreased by
50%.Overall, the systems are more
flexible and perform better with the use of Oracle GoldenGate.

But that isn’t all.Türk Telekom is not finished using Oracle GoldenGate.Future projects include:archiving large log tables and transaction
tables on the OLTP database for Siebel and Oracle SOA Suite applications in
use, directing all application reports to the archive database and totally
removing the workload on the OLTP database, as well as wanting to use the
archive database as the source for GoldenGate replication to configure
cascading replication from the archive database.While lots of work is ahead for the team at Türk Telekom – their success and desire for more of it is very
motivating!